Imagine Starting Your Creative Process With Ideas

The dreaded carte blanche. Photo by Frederick Medina on Unsplash

I was interviewed by Rob Schwartz this week for his (fantastic) “Disruptor Series Podcast” (my episode comes out in June sometime) and something I said without much thought struck a chord with him. It was something I’ve said or written hundreds of times, to the point where its significance had probably waned for me. But not for Rob. For him, a light bulb went off. The notion, to paraphrase, was that the ideas an agency gets from Ideasicle X tend to inspire more ideas with an agency’s internal teams. And it’s true. Let me explain.

Ideas inspire ideas (repeat)

When a creative team is given carte blanche the possibilities are endless, which makes coming up with any one idea more difficult. Providing your own creative team with ten ideas from the outside (as you can easily do with Ideasicle X) gives the team ten sources of inspiration to roll their minds around. Each idea will either speak to the team or it won’t. Even that exercise is useful in figuring out where the team wants to go next. But better yet—and I’ve seen this happen countless times—the teams often consume an idea they didn’t come up with and BOOM it inspires another even better idea.

Ideas inspire ideas. It’s the nature of the universe. But why?

Ideas are smaller boxes

I remember when I was at Arnold Worldwide the great ECD Pete Favat said in an internal strategy meeting for a pitch, with frustration in his voice, “Just give me a smaller box!” It was odd to me to hear that from this great creative mind that he didn’t want a bigger box in which to roll his mind around, but a smaller one. He later explained that what he meant was he wanted a potent, single-minded insight because one tight insight can inspire all kinds of ideas. The smaller box was code for a bigger insight.

The analogy to the creative process that comes to mind is choosing music to play on Spotify. When you can play literally anything in the world - any artist, any song, any genre - it becomes quite difficult to choose anything to play. Too many choices makes it difficult to make a choice (see “Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz - no relation to Rob that I know of). Worse, too many choices make you feel badly about anything you do eventually choose.

But if prompted with, “Play a band from the British Invasion, please,” now the choice is inspired with a potent, smaller box. And that choice is The Beatles (obviously). Just kidding, but with an idea (British Invasion) it’s much easier and more fun to choose something to play.

The same is true with creativity. When you can drive a dump truck through a creative brief—meaning, the brief is non-committal to any insight and basically “carte blanche”—a strategist may think that’s inspiring because you’re removing all shackles from the creative team. But it’s not, it’s paralyzing. When you can do everything, it’s hard to think of anything.

Ideas jump start the creative process

On average we see 40 original ideas with over 300 builds and riffs with a 5-7 day Ideasicle X project. There are many reasons for this proliferation of ideas—four people bring their four perspectives to each project, they can post ideas from wherever they are, they inspire each other with their ideas (see above), etc.—and many of the ideas coming out of the process will be solid enough to have a team develop for presentation.

But Rob Schwartz reminded me in our interview just how important all the other ideas are in potentially inspiring even more and better ideas with an agency’s internal team. It’s a cheat code.

Ideasicle X was never intended to replace any agency’s creative department. It’s just a tool to make it better. Thanks for the reminder, Rob.